Is Africa The Next Big Market For Cryptocurrencies?

Africa is rarely mentioned among the largest markets for cryptocurrencies. But it may be set to steal a march over other markets. (See also: The Rise Of Africa below)
The surge in popularity of cryptocurrencies spurred the opening of at least 15 trading venues there within the past year alone. Peer-to-peer marketplaces also recorded a spike in trading volumes as bitcoin’s price skyrocketed last year. For example, trading volumes in Kenya on localbitcoins.com increased to $8.1 million in December 2017. Luno reported 2000 BTC worth of transactions in November 2017, when the cryptocurrency’s price was hovering in the $10,000 range. Approximately 37% of those transactions occurred in South Africa.

Recently, the continent’s oldest exchange disclosed lofty ambitions. Luno is a cryptocurrency exchange based in South Africa. It started operations in 2013 and boasts 1.5 million users spread across 40 countries. By 2025, it plans to reach 1 billion customers. For context, North America’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase reported 11.7 million users last year.

There are a couple of reasons why Africa might become the next big market for cryptocurrencies.
First, local conditions in Africa are conducive to adoption of cryptocurrencies. Several countries in the continent suffer from rampant inflation. For example, Zimbabwe and South Sudan both have runaway inflation rates.

With their paradigm of decentralization, cryptocurrencies offer an alternative to disastrous central bank policies. In fact, South Africa’s central bank recently announced a pilot test using ethereum’s blockchain for smart contracts. Second, the penetration of mobiles within the continent has helped its population become comfortable with cryptocurrency technology. In the evolution of its financial services ecosystem, Africa skipped step involving the setup of physical banking infrastructure to a decentralized mobile money platform.

New businesses that use blockchain have emerged. Kenya-based BitPesa, a payment platform and money transfer service, works with 60 banks around Africa and has seven mobile wallets on its platform. Third, the threat of government regulation, which has roiled cryptocurrency markets recently, is currently fairly low in Africa. While they have warned about the dangers of investing in cryptocurrencies, regulators in African countries have taken a hands-off approach to trading at exchanges.
But Africa is susceptible to the same pressures as other cryptocurrency markets. Cryptocurrency traders in Africa were paying a premium of as much as 40 percent in 2017 as bitcoin’s price reached new records. According to some reports, the premium occurred due to a shortage of liquidity, meaning sellers were able to command unrealistically high prices due to high demand from buyers.

The rise of Africa

For decades, much of the world has been conditioned to think of Africa, from Tangier to the Cape of Good Hope, as a uniform morass of poverty.
Nevertheless, it's limiting and unfair to treat a 12 million-square-mile continent with a billion people as a single entity. No one assumes that Finns and Greeks share a culture, nor Canadians and Mexicans; yet to many uninformed critics, Africa is one homogeneous outpost of poverty and starvation. Not only is that the grossest of generalizations, it's inaccurate.Africa Today and in the Future No, Africa doesn't enjoy quite the standard of living that the world's richest countries do. On the United Nations Human Development Report, the highest-ranking sub-Saharan nation on the African mainland is Gabon, which came in at a modest #106. However, the country is inching upward, progressing along a timeline common among many African nations: colonialism, followed by nominal independence, followed by long-overdue economic reforms and a corresponding increase in the standard of living. It was over a relatively brief period - barely two generations - that South Korea and the United Arab Emirates propelled themselves from destitution to affluence. Today, we could be witnessing that same phenomenon across Africa.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts that between now and 2015, Africa will be home to seven of the world's 10 fastest-growing economies. In descending order, that's Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, West Congo, Ghana, Zambia and Nigeria. (Granted, "fastest-growing" is hardly the same as "flourishing;" by contrast, the American and Luxembourgish economies can't possibly grow as quickly as ones whose every incremental step is noteworthy.) Finally, after countless years of mass governmental corruption abetted by misguided charity, much of Africa is jumping into the 21st century.Look no further than the sophisticated financial instrumentation befitting sophisticated economies - specifically, exchange traded funds devised to attract Western investment. Van Eck Global, a New York-based management firm, developed the Market Vectors Africa Index ETF (NYSEArca:AFK) for that very purpose. The fund restricts itself to companies that either are headquartered in Africa, or derive most of their revenues from there. The fund's main components include Tullow Oil, a British oil producer whose biggest operations are in Ghana and Uganda; Orascom, an Egyptian construction firm; Guaranty Trust, a Nigerian bank; and Attijariwafa, a Moroccan bank, with other banks and breweries rounding out the top 10. It may come as a shock to some, but Africans deposit their money somewhere and build buildings, and drink beer, just like the rest of us.Africa-centric exchange traded funds aren't intended as "socially responsible" investing, created to make guilt-stricken investors feel good about themselves. Rather, this is real investing, done with the intention of turning a profit and building lasting wealth. The Market Vectors Africa Index ETF has gained approximately 15% so far this year.Trade, Not Aid Hopefully, investment will overtake handouts as the predominant form of cash flow to Africa. By and large, being on the receiving end of the rest of the world's largesse has had the opposite of its intended effect. Zambian intellectual colossus Dambisa Moyo (chemist; economist; master's from Harvard; Oxford Ph.D.; director of Barclays Bank, SAB Miller and Barrick Gold, and only 42 years old) wrote the definitive book on this topic, "Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working And How There is Another Way for Africa."
She argues that the $1 trillion of well-meaning handouts that have found their way to her home continent have done more harm than good, creating a culture of idleness and indolence ("Why work when I can get what I want from a relief organization?"), and that's the best-case scenario. More often, aid payouts never even found their way past the people in charge.
The modernization of the continent is something best witnessed firsthand. A visitor to Cape Town or Windhoek would be struck by how gleaming and modern either southern African capital is. While the former does have shantytowns on its outskirts, they're strikingly similar to some of the filthier housing projects in the United States.
Unfortunately, most of the major news stories that have emerged from Africa in the last few years have been horrifying (Darfur, the Rwandan genocide.) In addition, the stories that haven't emerged have been even worse. (Like the Second Congo War, humanity's deadliest conflict since World War II. Yes, there was a First Congo War in the late 90s that you probably never heard about either.) This is the same continent that spawns a disproportionate number of the engineering and mathematics graduates at some of America's most prestigious universities - the people who will shape Africa's future.
The Bottom Line Africa has all the natural resources a continent could hope for, and is finally assembling the wherewithal to capitalize on that. The Industrial Revolution began in the United Kingdom almost two centuries ago, moving society en masse from an agrarian, subsistence economy to one characterized by force multipliers. Today, in a world where information flows freely and trade lifts millions out of poverty every year, Africa has only started to reach its potential and promise.